Everyday life and digital media in a thracian village: A feminist digital media ethnography

In June and September 2022, I carried out a feminist digital media ethnographyin one (or few) villages in Tekirdağ, Turkey, to understand whether digital media has arole in questioning, changing and reproducing gendered oppression in the everydaylives of villager women. Throughout the field research, I tried to understand whether digital media has a role in questioning, changing and reproducing the genderedoppression of villager women in their daily lives within a feminist framework. Thefindings from participant observation, in-depth interviews and informal conversationspresent villager women's experiences of digital media on three main dimensions: Practices of use, forms of meaning-making and performances. In this field research, inwhich I carried out a feminist digital media ethnography, I aimed to reveal theeverydayness of a technology that is shaped within certain power relations, that cannot be dealt with neither absolute freedom nor absolute dominance, and that producesagency. As a matter of fact, this methodological line offered the opportunity to explorehow social categories such as gender, class, space and identity overlap with eachother on the ground of digital media. In this sense, thinking about village and peasantryalsomade it easier to think about digital media, time, space and subjectivity. Throughout thefield research, I witnessed the existence of different forms of femininity and different forms of peasantry, and I aimed to understand the meaning of digital media for villager women by mediating these differences. In the villages where I carried out my research, there were women who were surprisingly passionate about digital media, as well asthose who experienced a kind of locked-in situation. In this study, I argue that digitalization has brought about a transformation in the understanding and constructionof the village, peasantry and being a woman in the village that was not there before. Economic, social and cultural changes are changing the ways in which subjects positionpeasantry, but digital transformation points to a new stage in the transformation of manypractices that used to be seen as "signs of peasantry" into things to be proud of. Inthehands of many villager women, digital media becomes a technology through whichtheyboth play with and reproduce the village-urban duality. Through digital media, womenreproduce certain normative, ideological and cultural imageries of peasantry while at thesame time shaking these norms. In this sense, digital media provides women inthevillage with a very important part of the symbolic material and environment theyneedto construct their cultural identities and subjectivities. Digital media opens up a spacenot only for them to reproduce authentic village sociality and the image of the "classic"peasant, but also for them to play with this image; to construct their own peasantryandmodernity; to make their labor visible, but also to hide and encashing their peasantry. Inthis framework, villager women's digital media patterns consist of performances, practices of use and discourses that aim to suspend and reproduce the existing at themost general level. This thesis contributes to the interdisciplinary field of media andcommunication studies on three main levels: Ethnographic, theoretical and spatial- geographical.